If this man were alive today, he’d be deleting some (but not all) of Scott Adams’ Tweets

I may have given out the first Donald Trump Memorial Award for Complete Lack of Self Awareness to the wrong person earlier today. Because, as much as Matt Forney deserves the award, Scott Adams may deserve it even more. For some of the same reasons, even.

Forney, you may recall, thinks that the EVIL JEWS of Twitter are shadowbanning him (that is, hiding some of his Tweets) for the crime of speaking truth to power, which in his case seems to involve a lot of calling people ‘f***ots” and “tr***ies” and suggesting they kill themselves.

Dilbert creator and dumb-opinion-haver Scott Adams similarly believes, or at least suspects, that the evil Hillary-lovers in charge of Twitter have “decided to suppress my free speech on the site, presumably because I have said good things about Trump’s talents for persuasion.”

He announced this suspicion, naturally, in a Tweet, which for some reason Twitter didn’t decide to suppress. Probably just to screw with his head, you know how devious those Twitter executives are.

I won’t jump the gun and assume something nefarious is happening. But I will say that IF it is happening, I would regard it as treason. If one political party can use the machinery of social networks to reduce free speech, that is an attack on American values at the deepest level.

And this would mean WAR between Adams and Twitter.

As a patriot, I would feel obligated to help kill Twitter. (And you wouldn’t want to bet against me.)

Now, as far as I know, Adams isn’t planning on sneaking into Twitter’s offices like a ninja and stealthily dispatching all of its executives. Nah! He just wants to start some sort of shareholder revolt becuase TREASON AGAINST SCOTT ADAMS (some of the time).

I understand Twitter is looking for a buyer. If management is shadowbanning me, that would be breach of fiduciary responsibility, screwing both the shareholders and the employees who hope the company can be purchased. In my view, shadowbanning would make Twitter too toxic to own. That toxicity – treason in my view – would transfer to the buyer.

How will he know if Twitter is actually guilty of the part-time, Scott-Adams-specific TREASON he’s talking about? Well, he sent a note to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey demanding WHERE ARE MY TWEETS OR AT LEAST SOME OF THEM YOU (part-time, Scott-Adams-specific) BENEDICT ARNOLD??11!! Or words to that effect.

I don’t have confirmation from Twitter that this is happening, so I tweeted Jack Dorsey today to ask. I’m sure he’s busy, but I’m hard to ignore. If no response in two days, I’ll assume my Twitter followers are correct that my tweets are not always showing up in their feeds.

LINE IN THE SAND

When Adams shared these thoughts — on Twitter — about how Twitter might be SILENCING HIM, well, let’s just say that some people skeptical of his treason theory treated him to some gentle ribbing.

Adams accused them of “cognitive dissonance,” and being PAID SHILLS FOR SHILLARY (or whoever).

It’s also interesting to me that despite being foul, villainous traitors who dared take up arms against the rightful authority of King George, many of the Founding Fathers of the US are held in relatively high regard in the UK. There’s a statue of George Washington in Trafalgar Square, for instance.

I have to admit, I have trouble taking Adams seriously, meaning, I keep thinking he MUST be kidding with his nonsense…. NO ONE can be that divorced from reality… can they?? That or he’s fallen seriously down his own rabbit hole and is now living IN a “Dilbert” strip….

Look, you all are being uncharitable, and that’s just not cool. I’m proposing that we rectify that, by taking up a collection and buying Adams an Occam’s (TM) Razor. His logic and reasoning will become so much more cogent once he wields the mighty power of Occam! (TM)

*This is totally not a paid advertisement, although the CEO of Occam’s (TM) Razors did give me a backrub once.*

As a patriot, I would feel obligated to help kill Twitter. (And you wouldn’t want to bet against me.)

Actually, I would…but as was pointed out earlier, though it’s a pretty sure bet, it’s not worth the cash outlay.

And Twitter neither lives nor dies at the whim of a very mediocre, middle-aged cartoonist, much less one tossing off moronic and forgettable “observations”. I’m sure your followers won’t die from bated breath awaiting a never-to-be-delivered, 140-character-or-less slice of Deathless Prose™ from you. If they do, they’re even more pathetic than you and your little stompy feet. And that’s really saying something.

To be fair, I suspect that was sheer stupidity rather than anything deiberate.

Sloppy or not, he was breaking the law. It’s on his campaign to scrub the mailing lists, not send out a spam blast and then say “whoopsie” afterwards. Had the MPs he solicited actually donated, I’m not convinced Trump would have conscientiously returned the funds unless caught and pressured to do so by the FEC.

If management is shadowbanning me, that would be breach of fiduciary responsibility, screwing both the shareholders and the employees who hope the company can be purchased.

Setting aside the titanic ego behind this statement, if I were looking to buy Twitter, the shadowbanning of people like Scott Adams would actually make it a more attractive prospect for investment. When you allow your social media platform to become a platform for hate, trolling, and bullying, it tends to shrink your customer base over time. It also makes it harder to attract new customers. Moderation would be one way of signalling that they’re committed to an inclusive, principled business model.

You can even make a book about that, and call it “To Kill a Antiscottadamsbird”. Best seller assured.

I’m sure he’s busy, but I’m hard to ignore

Indeed. Your ego is so large that it is hard to avoid it.
– “No Scott Adams should be ignored !”
– “But the president is busy right now.”
– “No true Scott Adams should be ignored !!!”

Adams accused them of “cognitive dissonance,” and being PAID SHILLS FOR SHILLARY (or whoever).

So, he is good at repeating pseuso-science NPL words but fails to use psychology terms ? Yet, this is strange because “Master Persuaders” know exactly what cognitive dissonance is, and how it can be a tool to manipulate… sorry, i mean, to persuade their audience. Pua, notably. Some skip the leg day, some skip the psychology day. Do you even sarge, bro ?

Treason? Really?? He can start whining about 1st Amendment “treason” when someone plucks his ridiculous blog out of his sticky little fingers. Not that losing his blog would count, either, but then at least he could whine while annoying fewer people.

All it takes is a few glitches in technology to set these guys off, it seems. After hearing about the Twitter glitches here and noticing that my cable was also glitchy (it made watching West Side Story on TCM last night impossible until it was almost over) my first thought was maybe there were sunspots/solar flares or something. In any case, it was better by 9:45 PST.

Just a reminder that Scott Adams has been caught – several times – registering fake ‘sockpuppet’ accounts on various websites in order to have his sockpuppets talk up what an awesome smart guy that Scott Adams is. A certified genius, according to new user ScottsSockPuppet01!

I love Mike Duncan’s description of his time in the Continental as a brave and talented officer “who always thought he was 1 or 2 positions lower than he deserved. While he gets points for probably being right, he loses them for complaining about it constantly.”

ETA: also interesting to consider what a national hero he’d have been considered if he had died of his wounds at Saratoga.

I sometimes think that he’s attempting (very, very poorly) to pull an Andy Kaufman-style ‘living performance’ where you never know where the real person ends and the act begins. The problem is that the act isn’t funny, and the person is an egotistical dullard, so really, who gives fuck?

Also, Scott: An engineer who is unfamiliar who doesn’t understand the concept of glitches and bugs is a shitty, shitty engineer; it’s a good thing you’re now in the job of recycling office jokes with crappy art.

I actually have an indirect connection to Benedict Arnold. (One of my ancestors served as his aide-de-camp.)

There’s actually a monument to Arnold in the U.S. up at Saratoga. It’s called the ‘Boot Monument’ and it commemorates the leg he lost while leading part of the Continental Army there to victory. Arnold’s name is not mentioned anywhere on the monument.

I’ve read up on him some; it’s obvious he felt justified in what he did, because some of the members of the Continental Congress had been acting against him in rather politically motivated manners, and had basically got him removed from command after his last injury. Then again, Arnold was both an obvious social climber (which made the southern members of Congress who already considered themselves Barons annoyed) and tended to be rather brusque when he felt that he was in the right. Even when he was right, he tended to annoy the people he was working with.

I have made this point here before, but Scott Adams’s remark about “Trump’s talents for persuasion” prompts me to make it again:

If Trump really is a “Master Persuader,” getting off one linguistic killshot after another, shouldn’t he be ahead in the polls, rather than far behind? Or–let’s lower the bar here–shouldn’t he have, on at least one point in this very long campaign, been ahead?

Moreover, shouldn’t a “Master Persuader” be actually winning people over to his side, rather than driving them away in large numbers–the latter being what Trump has inarguably be doing?

To be sure, I know the answer to the second question. The people that Trump is driving away all fall into groups that do not include Scott Adams–women, Americans of Mexican descent, immigrants, Muslims, people capable of empathy. So, naturally, Adams does not consider them of any consequence. Their votes don’t really matter in the same way his does.

And I can also guess Adams’s answer to the first question. By “persuasion,” he seems sometimes to literally mean hypnosis. So, he may really think that people who are now saying that they support Clinton and/or despise Trump will go into the voting booths and suddenly give in to an irresistible impulse to vote for Trump. That is an absurd argument, but there are some remarks by Adams that are impossible to interpret otherwise.

I’ve come to have a bit more nuanced view on why Trump supporters feel like he’s winning. I’ve seen a lot of interviews at this point where the Trumpista talks about the fact that everyone they know is voting Trump, and Trump talks about how much he’s winning. These are the only things that they really trust at this point, I think. They certainly don’t believe in the lamestream media, since the conservatives and republicans (and right wing radio, etc, etc) have been calling it biased for ages now.

Lots of people have been trained to mistrust anything they don’t see or hear themselves at this point. It’s got a really weird effect of making them vulnerable to crank conspiracy theory and outright misinformation, since they’ll take things which agree with their beliefs as being trustworthy, but have a ready-to-go excuse for disbelieving anything they don’t like. Thanks, Limbaugh.

I dunno how to pierce that bubble. They see Trump doing well because the people they know are voting for him, and they see the excited Trump rallies. Opposing information is discarded as being biased. How do you cut into that?

I remember reading from my GF’s Dillbert collection, and this was late 90s stuff, and coming across a week of strips where the whole joke was comparing a blind date with a trans woman to a date with a litteral dog. There were references to laser hair removal, facial reconstruction surgery, and it was frankly pretty damn blatant. Scott Adams seems to have always been a piece of work, it’s just how far out his dickishness is that has changed.

Also, Scott: An engineer who is unfamiliar who doesn’t understand the concept of glitches and bugs is a shitty, shitty engineer; it’s a good thing you’re now in the job of recycling office jokes with crappy art.

as far as i’m aware, Adams was never actually an engineer; he just worked with them for a gas company or something.

Man. I liked the Dilbert comic strip when I was younger. :/ I thought the jokes were decent and I liked the characters. I never knew the creator was a butt sandwich. I can’t imagine how nauseating and politically charged they have to be nowadays.

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